John Lea

What is to be done about law and order

The authors of this seminal work challenge many of the Lefts traditional attitudes toward crime and policing, proposing instead a rigorous, new Left realism for the issues raised.

Security, Sovereignty, and Non-State Governance "From Below"

Governmentality scholars document the new, pluralistic, post-Keynesian modes of public governance linking State and non State agencies. This emphasis on “governance from above” needs to be complemented by a focus on “governance from below” by non State actors, especially in urban areas. “Governance from below” may involve actors ranging from commercial organisations and citizens’ initiatives, to organised crime and paramilitary networks operating as sites beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign law and public authorities within and between countries. In both rich and poor countries these may be antagonistic to but may also become enrolled in forms of public governance. This paper challenges the view that governance from below fills the vacuum left by the retreat of the central nation State. Rather, these developments signify complex forms of re-articulation of relations of governance from above and below, which may at times strengthen the legal authority of the central State.

The Macpherson Report and the Question of Institutional Racism

This article focuses on the concept of institutional racism as deployed in the Macpherson Report into police handling of the murder of Steven Lawrence. After some remarks on the methodological difficulty of grounding the concept in an investigation of a single incident of failed murder inquiry, the focus shifts to Macphersons general understanding of the relations between police and black communities. Macpherson deploys a cultural explanation of institutional racism which is seen as grounded in the lack of contract between white police officers and black communities outside of the law enforcement relationship. This deflects from an understanding of the reproduction of institutional racism through the normal practices of operational policing, in particular ‘top and search’.

Reply to Norman Ginsburg

to write a reply. When eventually the review editor was able to persuade a number of potential respondents of our real intentions, pressures of work intervened preventing them completing the task. We would still very much welcome a critical response to the original review, preferably from the authors of ESB. Just as we would be very keen for these authors to write articles for CSP, and speak at our conferences. Given CSP’s aim of encouraging debate we still feel that our decision to publish the review was politically defensible. As already explained it is a decision we now regret, but naivety is not necessarily racism, and it is to do political argument a disservice to suggest it is. Jock’s review was raising a number of very important points about what he regarded as the left’s lack of political realism about crime, and about how certain styles of left politics prevent the development of a more practical, and realistic, approach. It is not wrong per se to publish such views they need careful scrutiny and considered responses. Yet upon reflection it would have been better to have initiated a debate about racism in the pages of CSP with a review of ESB by a black reviewer.